Mar 27, 2021 02:31 AM
https://psyche.co/ideas/wilfrid-sellars-...-the-given
EXCERPTS: Most of us think that knowledge starts with experience. You take yourself to know that you’re reading this article right now, and how do you know that? For starters, you might cite your visual experiences of looking at a screen, colourful experiences. And how do you get those? Well, sensory experiences come from our sensory organs and nervous system. From there, the mind might have to do some interpretative work to make sense of the sensory experiences, turning the lines and loops before you into letters, words and sentences. But you start from a kind of cognitive freebie: what’s ‘given’ to you in experience.
It’s a tantalising idea, and maybe it’s close to the truth. But if we’re not careful, we might run afoul of what the American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars (1912-89) called ‘the Myth of the Given’. While many philosophers consider Sellars’s attack on the Myth to be his legacy, it’s one of his least-understood ideas. That’s too bad, because once we set aside ‘epistemological shoptalk’ (one of my favourite Sellarsisms), the basic idea is simple – and far-reaching.
Let’s start with something easy. You probably know how to read tree rings, the circles-within-circles that appear in the cross-sections of trees. Tree rings form as a tree grows, making new layers of bark. Counting the rings helps you determine the tree’s age, since each ring correlates with one year of growth. [...] In a stricter sense, though, the tree rings don’t really ‘say’ anything. The patterns in the tree can give useful information to anyone who can read them, but the rings themselves aren’t actually ‘about’ anything. [...] They don’t express information in the way that trails, maps or sentences do.
But why not? In short, sentences can go wrong. They can be paradoxical (‘This sentence is not true’), or they can be false (‘Smoking cigarettes is safe’). Thought and speech can be correct or mistaken. While philosophers disagree about what makes things such as assertions and thoughts correct or mistaken, there’s widespread agreement that, when we think and speak, what we think and what we say can be judged according to particular standards, involving something like truth or knowledge.
[...] Empiricists think that human knowledge not only begins in experience, it’s exhausted by it. For the 18th-century philosopher David Hume, our senses give us impressions – as the name suggests, the world makes its mark on our minds by impinging on our sense receptors. [...] This is where the given becomes the Myth of the Given. Sensations – flashes in the nervous system – inexplicably become thoughts, which can be true or false, correct or incorrect. [...] Even when particular odour molecules reliably cause particular responses in your body, that regularity alone doesn’t settle whether you know there’s Parmesan cheese nearby, or even whether you have an idea of Parmesan cheese.
Humans aren’t creatures of habit, Sellars says, but of rules. To use his memorable turn of phrase, Sellars thinks that ideas, concepts, anything having to do with knowledge at all must stand in the ‘space of reasons’, the space of justification, rules and standards. In short, sensations belong to the causal order, like tree rings, but thought and speech (‘I smell Parmesan’) belong to the normative order, the space of reasons.
While sensations can be brought into the space of reasons (and they have to be, in order to amount to knowledge), they don’t get to be there by fiat. That’s the Myth: [...] Without learning, without training of any kind, a newborn with working senses could have experiences that amount to knowledge. By smelling her mother’s scent, she would be aware of her mother. Her olfactory experiences would be in the space of reasons without her having to learn the rules. That’s Mythical – it’s as impossible as the freak accident being a real game of chess.
Busting the Myth has significant downstream effects. [...] on our opening question: how do you know that you’re reading this? You wouldn’t be wrong to say (a little tortuously): ‘I’m having experiences of looking at squiggles, and I know that squiggles like that are letters that form words.’
Without the Myth, though, we have to rethink this approach. Those squiggles don’t just show up in your experience as squiggles (or more likely, as letters). You first have to learn to recognise them as such, as lines and angles. It’s only then, once you’ve learned to embody the rules and recognise them as rules (that is, the standards for something counting as a line, an angle, a curve), that the experiences can start to make sense. To understand our own experiences, we have to learn to interpret them. In a way, we have to learn to read our bodies like we learn to tell a tree’s age... (MORE - details)
EXCERPTS: Most of us think that knowledge starts with experience. You take yourself to know that you’re reading this article right now, and how do you know that? For starters, you might cite your visual experiences of looking at a screen, colourful experiences. And how do you get those? Well, sensory experiences come from our sensory organs and nervous system. From there, the mind might have to do some interpretative work to make sense of the sensory experiences, turning the lines and loops before you into letters, words and sentences. But you start from a kind of cognitive freebie: what’s ‘given’ to you in experience.
It’s a tantalising idea, and maybe it’s close to the truth. But if we’re not careful, we might run afoul of what the American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars (1912-89) called ‘the Myth of the Given’. While many philosophers consider Sellars’s attack on the Myth to be his legacy, it’s one of his least-understood ideas. That’s too bad, because once we set aside ‘epistemological shoptalk’ (one of my favourite Sellarsisms), the basic idea is simple – and far-reaching.
Let’s start with something easy. You probably know how to read tree rings, the circles-within-circles that appear in the cross-sections of trees. Tree rings form as a tree grows, making new layers of bark. Counting the rings helps you determine the tree’s age, since each ring correlates with one year of growth. [...] In a stricter sense, though, the tree rings don’t really ‘say’ anything. The patterns in the tree can give useful information to anyone who can read them, but the rings themselves aren’t actually ‘about’ anything. [...] They don’t express information in the way that trails, maps or sentences do.
But why not? In short, sentences can go wrong. They can be paradoxical (‘This sentence is not true’), or they can be false (‘Smoking cigarettes is safe’). Thought and speech can be correct or mistaken. While philosophers disagree about what makes things such as assertions and thoughts correct or mistaken, there’s widespread agreement that, when we think and speak, what we think and what we say can be judged according to particular standards, involving something like truth or knowledge.
[...] Empiricists think that human knowledge not only begins in experience, it’s exhausted by it. For the 18th-century philosopher David Hume, our senses give us impressions – as the name suggests, the world makes its mark on our minds by impinging on our sense receptors. [...] This is where the given becomes the Myth of the Given. Sensations – flashes in the nervous system – inexplicably become thoughts, which can be true or false, correct or incorrect. [...] Even when particular odour molecules reliably cause particular responses in your body, that regularity alone doesn’t settle whether you know there’s Parmesan cheese nearby, or even whether you have an idea of Parmesan cheese.
Humans aren’t creatures of habit, Sellars says, but of rules. To use his memorable turn of phrase, Sellars thinks that ideas, concepts, anything having to do with knowledge at all must stand in the ‘space of reasons’, the space of justification, rules and standards. In short, sensations belong to the causal order, like tree rings, but thought and speech (‘I smell Parmesan’) belong to the normative order, the space of reasons.
While sensations can be brought into the space of reasons (and they have to be, in order to amount to knowledge), they don’t get to be there by fiat. That’s the Myth: [...] Without learning, without training of any kind, a newborn with working senses could have experiences that amount to knowledge. By smelling her mother’s scent, she would be aware of her mother. Her olfactory experiences would be in the space of reasons without her having to learn the rules. That’s Mythical – it’s as impossible as the freak accident being a real game of chess.
Busting the Myth has significant downstream effects. [...] on our opening question: how do you know that you’re reading this? You wouldn’t be wrong to say (a little tortuously): ‘I’m having experiences of looking at squiggles, and I know that squiggles like that are letters that form words.’
Without the Myth, though, we have to rethink this approach. Those squiggles don’t just show up in your experience as squiggles (or more likely, as letters). You first have to learn to recognise them as such, as lines and angles. It’s only then, once you’ve learned to embody the rules and recognise them as rules (that is, the standards for something counting as a line, an angle, a curve), that the experiences can start to make sense. To understand our own experiences, we have to learn to interpret them. In a way, we have to learn to read our bodies like we learn to tell a tree’s age... (MORE - details)
